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Figment, Governor's Island, NY, June 28, 2008 |
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On June 28th on Governor's Island, I participated in the arts festival, Figment. On the left, is my sister, Sr. Susan Rakoczy, Ph.D, visiting from South Africa, and working on the knitting. We welcomed passersby to stop and knit a few rows of plastic with us. It was fun, and a couple of little girls learned to knit that day. |
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| Cape: The Good News is complete. It's floor length and knit from the beautiful, blue plastic bags from the NY Times. There are blue beads incorporated into the design. Each row of beads represents 45-60 minutes of knitting. The blue and black hues remind me of Van Gogh's blues from "Starry Starry Night." |
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| "When did we start knitting plastic?" overheard on November 3, 2007 at Decompression, Queens Museum of Art, New York |
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I've had to rethink my project, "A Year of Plastic." Stockpiling a year's worth of plastic is far more daunting than I anticipated. I think it will have to be a metaphysical 'year.' On November 3, 2007, some volunteers and I from 'Decompression' at the Queens Museum, began knitting the malleable plastic from plastic bags. So far, I've knitted together the plastic from Thanksgiving: the white plastic that my frozen turkey came in, the bag from the cranberries and the stuffing. The Arnold bread bags, the plastic bag from Snickers, the shrink wrap from a poster, lots of Key Food bags. the ones from my coffee filters, and sundry others all have been incorporated. Because of Thanksgiving, the month of November generated a huge amount of plastic bags, even though I kept meaning to bring my own bag to the store, I just never did. It's my new domestic duty to transform this detritus into a more meaningful form, rather than let it linger as landfill on Staten Island.
I'm doing this project as a way to call attention to the amount of plastic we use and discard unthinkingly. If we could actually see the amount of plastic used in a year's time, I think we might consider changing our wasteful ways. So you might say that I'm rendering the invisible, visible.
I'm considering different forms the knitting might take. I might shape it into a small house. Or a giant octopus threatening to strangle us in our own waste. (Maybe too corny). Maybe a giant plastic bag: plastic bags reconstituted into a plastic bag. I'm open to ideas.
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That's me at
Decompression |
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| Participants knitting plastic at Decompression |
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| A sample of the knitting |
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